And so to 2012. As we embark on the final year of our civilisation’s time on the earth, with hopes of hoverboards and Skynets and robot mistresses fading, with Mayans falling from the sky and three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse dressed and ready, I have cause to reflect on all that we achieved together last year. If I recall correctly, I did some minor bits of very little and you didn’t bother reading about them.

We started our social work placements, righting wrongs on emergency duty shifts and de-offending young offenders. We took the Zero manifesto to the next generation, taking up residence in the uni magazine to bang on about vegetarianism, ethical tourism, volunteering and full on proper meddling. We took to the streets for the National Spring Clean, picking up litter, junk and a touch of Hepatitis. We reached out to artists and photographers to fill the site with images and steal nothing from no one. We campaigned for the AV referendum, succeeding brilliantly and transforming our electoral system forever if memory serves. We gave to a ton of Chazzas of the Month and reloaned our Kiva cash to entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone, Kenya and Rwanda. We completely failed to buy an environmentally friendly car, ran a couple of 10ks for chazza and bought vegetarian running shoes in the interests of thoroughness. We went to Nepal, gave to a hard up school, bigged up Fairtrade and fought the class war in Kathmandu. We signed a bunch of e-petitions that didn’t go anywhere because they weren’t sufficiently crass or racist. We freecycled til we couldn’t freecycle no more, we watched and told others to watch The Cove, and we did nothing while they killed Troy Davis. We bigged up the Nestlé boycott, joined a union to score a day off and converted the office to environmentalism in preparation for the return of Gore. And then we sort of ballsed it all up for a few weeks at the end there in a shameful display of inactivity as deadlines and late nights kicked us rather spectacularly in the arse.

But now we begin again, refreshed and ready, socks pulled up, new leaves purchased and turned over. And although our days are numbered, enough remain with which to do good. This will be the year we qualify as a social worker and get to meddle professionally, without essays jamming up our out of hours do-gooding time, with salary to do more good in the direction of charity. Opportunity awaits and resolutions are to be resolted. Or resoluted, depending on how far you’re willing to taunt the English language.

Last year we resolved to run a 10k for chazza (done), buy the world’s most ethical toothbrush (done) and launch Operation Parmesan (done, just barely, like Indy sliding under a door of rock and just about grabbing his hat). They were a mix of the clichéd, the tedious and the who gives a shit but they got done. This year I propose the following mix of the groundbreaking, the earth shattering and the game changing: First, I’ll be a better vegetarian, going after better sources of protein and vitamins and cooking halfway decent stuff instead of just heating up guff made by the ghost of Linda Macartney. Second, I’ll give more to charity, building up to about ten percent of my take-home once the worst of my student debts are covered and assuming Mrs Zero’s still around for me to sponge off. Third, I will actually succeed in buying the most environmentally friendly car my budget can manage when this current model dies as it inevitably will before the year is out. And fourth, I will look to switch my energy supplier to one that deals exclusively in wind, water, heart and various other Planeteers.

I will do these things. I will do all these things and more. And if I don’t, may God strike me dead where I stand. Or put shaving foam in my hand when I’m asleep on his couch and then tickle my nose.

Read through the Nepal Diaries, you could reach the end thinking I hate the place, presenting as they do an endless parade of poverty, frustration and half-empty glasses. But it’s a cracking country, a ramshackle would-be paradise packed full of friendly, generous people, packed full of culture and tradition and cracking food, packed full of energy and activity and ambition. It’s just a shame so much of it gives me the shits.

There are reasons to despair and feel hopeless here, and I’ve had my share of feeling both. But there are reasons to feel hopeful and optimistic, and every so often I give them a bash too. There’s discrimination against women to make you sick but women and men fighting it. There’s a caste system and prejudice like a localised racism but people saying it’s a pile of bollocks. There’s poverty like you wouldn’t believe but people figuring their way out of it, people working to change the systems that keep them poor.

In my last week in Nepal I visited Mahaguthi, a Fairtrade shop in Lalitpur. Here we have some nice stuff and the usual tourist dreck you’d find anywhere but no workers screwed over, no people kept down and poor. It sells handmade paper through a UNICEF cooperative in Bhaktapur that pays its workers a decent wage and counts women as more than 50% of its workforce. It sells bags, purses and camera bags from the Women’s Skills Development Project in Pokhara that employs disabled, divorced, abused and low-caste women. It sells nettle cloth from the Allo Cloth Production Club in the remote Sankhuwasabha district and Mithila paintings from the women of the Southern Terai, and all under the watchful eyes of the World Fair Trade Organization and the Fair Trade Group Nepal. This is how the world will right itself: people working together as opposed to people screwing each other over. This is how Nepal will progress. This and a shitload of aid.

So there’s Nepal for you. You should visit. You’ll have an amazing time, see amazing things, put money into a poor economy and experience what amounts to the most prolonged enema of your life. I’ve offered that as a slogan to the tourist board. Just waiting to hear back…

Being as how education is the route out of poverty, and being as how Nepal has poverty like Facebook has banality, it’s been interesting to see how education goes here; how it works, how it’s funded, what good it does anyone.

At the top of the pile we have university graduates, hefty fees for a decent enough education in science, management and engineering, subjects with which to build a future. It’s been good to talk to these types; politicised enough to be angry, educated enough to know their best hope lies in leaving the country. With them goes their expertise, their knowledge and a piece of the country’s chances. They know it, and guilt and self-preservation do battle.

Hoping to be among them we have kids at private schools doing SLC and +2, the equivalent of GCSEs and A-levels. There are fees to be paid here too, tough in a country where there’s not much money knocking about and the habit of putting children to work instead. And let’s be clear: paying fees here doesn’t buy you elocution and David Cameron, it buys a basic education, just enough to move up a step.

Below them, the government-funded free schools. I visited one this week, a bare concrete building in a village of mud-brick houses and subsistence farming. The poverty there was so overwhelming it was almost irrelevant to the world around it. In a small mud house, with generations packed in, with loose potatoes stacked on the floor, with life primitive and divided into shitting, sleeping, eating or none of the above, little details like wealth and hope and acquisition of stuff seem to exist in a parallel universe or a far off future, distant and inaccessible, like space travel to the stone age.

The school seems like the best hope going. There, kids who might be destined to work fields like the seventeen generations before them are learning stuff to take them elsewhere or fix up where they are. It comes off like a wobbly-legged David, under-resourced like the moon is under-populated, dirt-poor, equal parts depressing and inspiring and about the most admirable thing I’ve seen in my life.

It’s July’s Charity of the Month. I made a donation to go to new books or sports equipment or more of the essentials like, for example, chairs. I trust the money will be well spent, given to the headmaster Mrs Zero has known for years. He’s a good guy doing a good thing. I’m a loaded guy doing not much.

One of the hardest things about visiting Nepal is being surrounded by poverty, knowing you could do something to help, knowing your something wouldn’t get very far. There are so many people here living below the poverty line you could blow your life savings a hundred metres from the airport and feel you’ve made a dent on nothing, walk another metre and find someone else you should have given to.

The UN ranks Nepal in the least developed countries in the world, reckons 30% of its people live below the bar of $2 a day. It’s hard to explain what that looks like. There are levels of poverty here. On my first visit I was shocked to see a girl in immaculate school uniform walk into a tin hut and call it home. Last week there was a kid following us around, begging for money. He had shoes on and trousers. We asked him where his parents were and he told us, which meant he had some. By Western standards he’s struggling. Here, he’s getting by.

It’s easy for poverty to lose all meaning here. I’ve seen tourists who figure they can’t give to everyone round it up so they give to no-one. I’ve seen them shoo away beggars who look about ten minutes from death, seen them haggle over seven pence they don’t care about like it’s a sport. I’ve worked out a ranking system so crass I’m embarrassed to tell anyone who hasn’t been here and worked out their own.

I said it’s hard to visit Nepal. Actually it’s a piece of piss; I know I’m ten days away from a hot shower. It’s hard to live in Nepal, harder if you’re a woman, harder still if you’re disabled or from the lower castes. There’s a guy at Boudha, the massive Buddhist stupa in the middle of Kathmandu. He’s a double amputee, his legs taken off just below the knees and not tidily. Seeing him half-walk, half-drag himself on his knees on the hard brick floor makes you grateful for just about everything you’ve had in your life. Yesterday there was a kid in the city centre, blind and dirty, rocking as he prayed, so out of it he didn’t notice if people were putting money his in bowl or walking on by. They’re in a different league to the girl with the hut and the kid with the trousers and a couple of parents.

There are days in Nepal where you look at the energy and the enterprise and feel hopeful for the future. Where you talk to a girl and her education shows, where a guy’s on a mobile and you figure there’s money somewhere. Then there are days where you find yourself looking for giant footprints, where you figure the country’s so wrecked Godzilla must be giving it a regular kicking. I gave the guy at Boudha a hundred Rupees; about 90p. He looked at me like I was fantastic. Somehow that made it a footprint kind of day.

Like Bryan Adams before me, my talent, wealth and international fame bring me much attention when in Nepal, but unless my fans speak English our conversations struggle to go beyond their names, how they are and if they know the way to the nearest emergency diarrhea clinic. And so it is I’ve started to learn Nepali. It serves as another example of how anything in life can be turned into a moral dilemma if you’re principled, determined to live ethically and short of ideas for blog entries.

It’s a hell of a language to get to grips with, its 11 vowels, 33 consonants and 442 syllable characters requiring a little effort, particularly as they’re written in Devanagari script. The ethics kick in around the point of the low, middle and high forms of address, used according to the quality of the people you’re talking to. The book what I’m reading suggests using the high forms for equals and superiors or for a wife addressing her new husband, the middle forms for friends or those slightly beneath me, and the lower forms for the likes of children, animals and junior servants. Now, I’m all up for a bit of cultural relativity but on the other hand: nuts to that.

No doubt my French speaking readers (Jacques Chirac, Madame Cholet, that guy from Allo Allo) think I’m making a fuss about nothing, waving around their ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ forms as examples of how common this kind of thing is. But it feels different here, representing a caste system that ranks its people and sticks ‘the untouchables’ at the bottom. We’re talking lives rigidly defined by birth, the way they once were in Britain. Here we have inter-caste relationships frowned upon. Here we have people in their places, little hope for change or improvement or social mobility. I’m not up for that at all.

This isn’t the whole picture, obviously. It’s hard to generalise about an entire country, its people, culture and identity without missing the odd bit of detail. I’ve met plenty of Nepalis who reject this kind of thing either with a casual indifference or righteous anger, plenty of Nepalis who say nuts to it. All of which brings us to the do-gooding bit: I’m not going to use the middle forms and I won’t bother learning the low forms. I’ll stick with the high stuff, figuring it’s better to come off like an over-polite, excessively formal toff to some guy who’s been told he’s beneath me than to come off like I think there’s anyone walking the earth who’s beneath me or anyone else walking on it.

And with that, the caste system and its many associated problems have been abolished.

Having submitted my Nepal field report to the UN I’m back home and so jetlagged if someone suggested Carol Thatcher was the world’s most beautiful woman I couldn’t muster brains enough for a decent rebuttal. With that in mind, in place of the standard witty, informative and peerlessly researched entry I’m getting out the projector for a holiday slideshow. These should give you a taste of life in a poor-as-Mickey-Rourke-in-the-90s country. You get the lights, I’ll get the Twiglets.

Two kids wash in the polluted Bagmati river, looking as dirty getting out as when they went in. That’s life without running water.

On every third rooftop in the country, 10,000 litre water tanks collect rain and pump down to the floors below.

An advert for solar power and a vision of the future, with old village huts adorned with solar panels. This is less about environmental foresight, more a practical response to 16 hour power cuts.

The glamour of environmentalism: a water and paper-saving squat toilet.

Street children in the Bagmati river, feet away from a body about to be cremated. They are collecting coins thrown into the river by mourners honouring the dead. This is all kinds of poor right here.

That’ll do for the Nepal diaries. As for India, I visited a touristy place in the south of the country and can make the following observations: The people of India are mostly white. Their conversation is generally of the obnoxious sort, focusing on the inferiority of their accommodation. They spend their time buying tat, turning pink, getting drunk and trying to score. It’s true what they say: travel has broadened my mind.

As responsible, upstanding Zeroes we’ve always got an eye on water conservation. We boil just enough for the cup of tea we’re making, we take showers instead of baths, we’ve stuck hippos or bottles in our cisterns to use less when we flush and we only bother washing when we know we’re going to score. It’s been interesting to look at these ideas in the context of Nepal, where water is scarce and conservation a necessity rather than a fad for right-ons.

The streets of Kathmandu are not blessed with the massive underground network of pipes and sewers that lurk beneath our own. Water has to be saved and used sparingly because wells dry up and months pass without rain. Right now the monsoon is throwing down everything it has; a few months ago trees were covered in dust, the ground cracked.

The difference that makes to people depends on their income. Some collect their own water from wells drilled deep into the ground or in huge barrels that collect rainwater when it comes. Others are dependent on tanker deliveries and the poorest on communal water pools and rivers about as clean as the average student’s toilet. In my time here I’ve showered in a hotel, had bucket washes from taps, barrels and wells and gone a few days without washing when the supply has dried up. At the time of writing I honk like a hobo puking into a septic tank.

Nepal’s water problem gives us a glimpse of our past and a potential future, echoing life before the underground network was built and suggesting how we might live again should climate change give us a kicking and the rain dry up. One primitive/futuristic water saving feature here is the squat toilet. Waste drops directly into a tank beneath the toilet, no paper is used and only a small jug of water is required should it need help on its way down. It’s a system the West could adapt, throwing in a touch more hygiene and a decent disposal system so that in years to come we look back and wonder why we bothered inventing the flush in the first place. It would be a shame if instead, as Nepal develops, it takes on our bad habits, repeats our mistakes and fills its houses with our water wasters.

At this point you may be wondering how a certain task is completed when there’s no toilet paper involved. I consider it quite beneath my dignity to go into any detail but you’re no doubt aware of the phrase ‘The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing’. Right now that’s probably for the best. If my right hand had any idea what my left hand was getting up to in the absence of bog roll it’d never let me high five myself again.

Travel from the UK to a country like Nepal you’re likely to notice one or two differences. Here, they watch Indian Idol not The X Factor, they have less vegetable oil in their chocolate, and also their infrastructure, utilities, healthcare and education are about as screwed as you’re going to get this side of an apocalypse. Generations of corrupt government, a decade of civil war and insufficient foreign aid have left a beautiful, vibrant country on its knees and among the poorest 20 in the world.

There’s no health service, no sewage system, no rubbish disposal, a serious shortage of electricity and an unreliable supply of dirty water. Kevin Costner delivers the post. But here’s where it gets difficult for the blogger: it’s hard to write without turning to telethon cliché about the people having dignity, how even in desperate poverty the people have hope, how despite everything going against them they keep on trucking. But generalisations are generally unhelpful. We could say Americans are all rich and morbidly obese but they have their share of homeless anorexics. We could say the British are reserved but millions of them every year get their tits out on Big Brother.

Nepal has its share of well-to-dos. It has people living in decent houses and paying for a half-decent university education. It has people living in fairly crappy houses, working unskilled jobs but keeping things together. It has people in shacks, on the streets, barely living. Some people are pissed off, some are downtrodden, some are looking to escape to the West, some manage it, some are looking to stay and make things better. There’s some dignity knocking about but with it frustration, shame, anger, resignation, apathy, drive, ambition and everywhere a sense that this isn’t deserved, that things should be better. I appear to have lapsed into a generalisation there. The British have bad teeth. There’s never been a polite Frenchman.

The point I’m probably trying to make, if I understand myself correctly through this haze of jetlag and borderline diarrhoea, is that we’re Zeroes, damn it, and we’ll remember that within the boundaries of their basic crappiness developing countries house a range of lives and experiences on the same sort of scale as our own.